Adobe Stock Launched to Kick Shutterstock et al Out of the Game

Janil Jean Jun 17, 2015

Adobe’s Smart Move

For several years, Adobe has been a top provider of tools that professionals use to craft imagery. Now, the brand plans to keep the users intact while they browse through stock images, directly through the tools they use to fashion visuals. If you ask me, this move could very likely result in huge profits for the company as people who search for stock images always need to leave Photoshop and move on to another website that’ll provide them with images that best match their requirements. Believe it or not, stock photography websites can suck your sales away real fast. While they get these images from other sources, they eventually end up using Photoshop or other Adobe tools to tweak/use these images.

Adobe Intends to Rule the Stock Image Market Throne

Adobe has smartly played its cards by acquiring Fotolia (a stock image platform) back in Jan’15 for a sum of 800M USD that now acts as the backbone of Adobe Stock. Fotolia has a database of over 40Million photos, illustration, and videos (soon to be launched), which now acts as a starting point for Stock.

The launch of this new service and acquisition of Fotolia has made Stock a direct competitor of brands like Shutterstock, Photobucket, iStock etc. Adobe has declared war against these industry giants to dethrone them to take their place!

Reasons Why Adobe Wants to Explore this Industry

Adobe claims that it’s a good time to enter the market because 85% images uploaded on to these other platforms selling stock data have used adobe products to create/refine.

Stock is very likely to follow the same pricing format as the rest of its products. It’ll charge a monthly fee of 50 USD for 10 pictures, while 750 downloads will be allowed at a cost of $200 (per month), which is fairly cheap if compared with other services.

Stock, by birth, has an upper hand over all these stock image services. This is because Adobe plans to launch this new service through Photoshop and eventually integrate the system into all of its products. The idea of integrating stock images with the most widely used graphical tools is indeed an ingenious, innovative business decision that will surely give their competitors a run for their money.

And since Adobe will be offering these stock images inside every tool in the future, it is very likely that users will switch to Adobe tools which would not only increase the revenues through stock sales, but would also bring a positive impact on the sales of other Adobe products.

What if Adobe plans to facilitate amateur users by offering services like Canva?

Imagine if Adobe was to step in to a space where brands like Canva, PicMonkey, Piktochart and Animoto operate to provide built-in templates, fonts, and a set of colors for amateurs to design anything they can using these simple platforms

This would certainly be something different than what Adobe usually works on. They must also know that there is a much larger chunk of audience that is feeding off of these tools. Then, there are those who use these services to get basic image work done. If the brand does plan to cater this set of audience then it can largely benefit from it.